Malice in Wonderland


holy crap, dude

Cuteness Break


gotta take a cuteness break whenever things get too heavy..
  • cuteness
  • red rum



    Desire


    Currently enjoying a hypertext project by Christian Hubert:
    narcissism and desire:

    Narcissus expired through his delusory desire "because he could not lay hold of himself, and yet perceived himself as other. (Ovid) Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage follows both Ovid and Freud in stressing the basically narcissistic relation of the subject to his counterpart, the specular ego. In this way Lacan also sets up the erotic attraction or aggressive tension as a relation to a counterpart ("another who is me"), who can only exist because the ego is originally another. (See " Imaginary" in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis) The collapse into the self enacted by Narcissus is transformed for prototypically narcissistic female subjects into a fundamentally alienated relationship to her external image.

    L'Eclisse (The Eclipse)



    Excerpts from A Vigilance of Desire: Antonioni's L'eclisse by Jonathan Rosenbaum
    Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy—that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy.

    Sexist pronouns and all, this prognosis is tied to the issue of art and business coexisting in the modern world, with the specter of selling out a near-constant in the trilogy’s first two films. Sandro is a former architect who becomes rich by forsaking his art in order to make cost estimates for other architects’ buildings. Giovanni, a successful but bored novelist, is offered a job by a wealthy industrialist whose party he attends with his wife, Lydia (Jeanne Moreau). Sandro lusts in turn after Anna, Claudia, and a hooker, while Giovanni responds to a nymphomaniac hospital patient, to the teenage daughter of the industrialist (Vitti again), and, eventually, to Lydia, who no longer loves him.

    But in L’eclisse, Antonioni started regarding Eros more positively, without the same overlay of guilt, and capitalism a little less monolithically as a vehicle for compromise or corruption. These changes become the first intimations of what appears to be a new attitude. Apart from a few throwbacks to treatments of Eros as illness—most notably in Red Desert, his next feature, where Vitti plays the most neurotic of all his characters—the celebration of eroticism has continued all the way up to Antonioni’s episode in the recent Eros, while his view of business, in spite of remaining critical (especially in Zabriskie Point), would also become a little more appreciative, as in his wonder at the vitality of the stock market in L’eclisse and the beauty of certain industrial landscapes in Red Desert.



    see also:
    La Notte
    Il Deserto Rosso

    Chianti and Red Jalapeno




    ..the blood red womb that is my new studio is actually painted in "chianti" and "red jalapeno".

    Pastel



    I'm thinking of making pastel versions of the paintings in my new series. Beautiful medium that it is. These are by Redon.

    Interior Design

    Frans Francken II

    Salvador Dali on "What's My Line?"

    Gorilla by Steven Larose appropriated by me.


    this is my version of self-portrait
    Steven Larose

    "The Black Swan" by Nassim Taleb


    I'm currently reading a brilliant book that seems to be the logical application of Anti-Foundationalist theory to real life. Taleb seamlessly weaves a discussion of statistics, philosophy, and economics into a defiant statement of anti-truth. What I appreciate most is the pervasive empirical skepticism of narrative fallacy that somehow refrains from resorting to the type of scholarly language that so readily alienates all the Chris Rywalts in our midst. People who have a knee-jerk disgust to all thing "Post-Modern" (you know who you are) might find themselves thoroughly and unwittingly seduced into an anti-Platonic criticism without even realizing that they had wandered into the forest of Nominalism.

    From the NY Times:
    Mr. Taleb is fascinated by the rare but pivotal events that characterize life in the power-law world. He calls them Black Swans, after the philosopher Karl Popper's observation that only a single black swan is required to falsify the theory that "all swans are white" even when there are thousands of white swans in evidence. Provocatively, Mr. Taleb defines Black Swans as events (such as the rise of the Internet or the fall of LTCM) that are not only rare and consequential but also predictable only in retrospect. We never see them coming, but we have no trouble concocting post hoc explanations for why they should have been obvious. Surely, Mr. Taleb taunts, we won't get fooled again. But of course we will.
    Writing in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne, Mr. Taleb divides the world into those who "get it" and everyone else, a world partitioned into heroes (Popper, Hayek, Yogi Berra), those on notice (Harold Bloom, necktie wearers, personal-finance advisers) and entities that are dead to him (the bell curve, newspapers, the Nobel Prize in Economics).

    A humanist at heart, Mr. Taleb ponders not only the effect of Black Swans but also the reason we have so much trouble acknowledging their existence. And this is where he hits his stride. We eagerly romp with him through the follies of confirmation bias (our tendency to reaffirm our beliefs rather than contradict them), narrative fallacy (our weakness for compelling stories), silent evidence (our failure to account for what we don't see), ludic fallacy (our willingness to oversimplify and take games or models too seriously), and epistemic arrogance (our habit of overestimating our knowledge and underestimating our ignorance).

    Paradise Lost


    End Times



    Pneumena and Theodorux

    Greensburg, Kansas

    Molasses


    Moccasin

    J.G Ballard on Salvador Dali


    The uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than any other view - whether the grim facts of the death-camps, Hiroshima and Viet Nam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dali, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophecy about ourselves unequaled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization And Its Discontents". Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our fears and longings, and our need to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game - these diseases of the psyche Dali has diagnosed with dismaying accuracy. His paintings not only anticipate the psychic crisis which produced our glaucous paradise, but document the uncertain pleasures of living within it. The great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia - preside over his life, as over ours.
    "Introduction" to Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali (1974)

    Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

    Share

    Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More